Career paths often don’t follow a straight, predictable path for many people in the technology and media and entertainment (M&E) sectors.
And that was certainly the case with Virginia Lyons, chief information security officer at Sony Pictures Entertainment, the speaker during the closing keynote “From Silicon Valley to Sony Pictures – My Adventures in Executive” at the SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit 2022 on Nov. 4 in Los Angeles.
The Summit was co-located with the Infinity Festival Hollywood event, and held as both a live, in-person event and online via the MESAverse virtual platform.
The closing “fireside” chat explored the career journey of Lyons, who explained how a theater major with a law degree ended up in the technology field developing some of the first ecommerce platforms and later moving into cybersecurity.
The session provided tips for young people interested in entering the technology and/or M&E sectors on how to guide their own path through personal triumphs and tribulations as they heard career advice on learning about new opportunities and the importance of deciding what their “non-negotiables” are.
Lyons followed “a bit of a circuitous route and I should start by saying I’m not only new to Sony Pictures; I’m new to Los Angeles,” she conceded, noting she grew up in the San Francisco Bay area.
“I’ve been down here for literally less than two months and fortunately have had a soft landing with some friends in the area who have helped with the transition,” she said. “But my background is a great example of everybody’s path being completely unique and following what you want to do.”
Lyons grew up in Silicon Valley and was a college theater/costume design major as an undergraduate, which “very naturally, of course, led to going to law school, like you do,” she joked, eliciting laughs from the audience.
Right after law school (Hastings College), she went “straight into software engineering, again, like you do,” she joked, noting she went to work for a legal publishing company that was looking for an attorney with a computer background to help its “migration to online and to the internet.” From there, she went to work for Macys.com, she said, noting she came from a family with strong backgrounds in science and technology.
Then, earlier this year, she got a call from Sony Pictures, which offered her a job, she recalled.
Her boss at Sony was welcoming and “had no ax to grind at this point in his career and I really, really liked every interaction I had with every single person I talked with from Sony” before joining it, she said. “I have to say it was the best interview process of my entire life because every single conversation I walked away from saying, ‘I want to work with this person,’” she added.
Also appealing to her was the journey it was on “transforming the IT organization and the finance organization,” she said, explaining: “It was all the kinds of things I love getting in: sorting things out and fixing things. If it’s all running smoothly I’m bored and looking for the next thing to fix.”
Moving on to offer advice to the audience, she said: “What I’ve found, for me … is trying to map where I want to be has never served me well. What has served me well is knowing what are my non-negotiable no’s” before taking any job. “Places I’m not willing to live, industries I’m not willing to work in [and] roles that I’m not interested in. And it makes it much easier when opportunities come across your desk to say, ‘No, this isn’t an industry I respect.’”
Lyons was interviewed by Theresa Miller, chief information officer at Lionsgate, and VP/treasurer of WiTH Foundation.
The SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit was presented by Ateliere with sponsorship by Amazon Studios, Softtek, Fortinet, Prime Video, SHI, Amazon Web Services, PacketFabric and Presidio.
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